Thursday, August 5, 2010

I have had the Sketch for You to Try (SFYTT) from May 29th sitting on my craft table all summer. I finally was able to use it. While I was cleaning/organizing my craft supplies, I came across a bunch of Prima flowers that were ivory with various colors of French written on them. I know that I got them in a tin with other solid color flowers at Michael's some time ago. I have long wondered what to do with these flowers! I never liked how the writing on the flowers looked when I was laying out a card. So, I decided to try dyeing them as I'd seen in the SU! catalog where you just add drops of refill ink into water, add the paper flowers, let them soak, take them out, and air dry.

These flowers had blue, green, or purple writing on them (I had some of each color) initially. I put them all into a little bowl with some SU! Basic Black ink intending to make black flowers. Here's what I got instead - varying shades of purple!

The flower on the top right with 12 petals is a black flower (purchased as a black flower) from another manufacturer. You can still see the writing still faintly on some of the petals, and the some of the flowers were more deeply tinted than others even after sitting overnight in the ink AND after I'd added MORE black ink. I checked them after soaking for a couple of hours and at that point they were a medium purple, so I put more ink into the bowl and left them overnight.

OK, so now I have all of these purple flowers - what to do?! I don't use a lot of purple, nothing against purple, I just am not drawn to it as I am say pink or green! :) So I turned to my Basic Grey Wisteria paper pad, found some papers that would work with these flowers, and this is the result.

The only place I got stuck while laying out the card was in using the larger strip of paper in the vertical panel. That particular paper had this little white leafy design that I really liked but then these huge brown roses, and I didn't want to have those big roses with these smaller scale patterns. So by stategically cutting which section of paper would fit in this space and allow me to cover that big brown flower with the horizontal band and the paper flowers, I got it hidden. (Seriously, the rose is nearly the size of the big purple flower!). I decided to use kraft as the layering color to tie the card together.

I stamped the sentiment from Verve's set "Blessings" on white, cut it with Nesties, embossed it, sponged around it with SU! Perfect Plum (the only purple ink I have, not a great match, but OK), cut the scalloped circle, and then just assembled the layers following the sketch. The purple flowers have 4 layers of dyed flowers (2 large ones that are offset and 2 smaller ones that are offset. I held the layers together with a small brad and then covered the brad head with an adhesive back pearl. I placed 8 smaller pearls around it for a bit more elegance and to cover a little of the writing that was still visible. Tip: to place these tiny pieces, I use a tweezers. For the small ivory roses, I curled the wire using a knitting needle. All of the flowers are attached with dimensionals. I used a MS punch for the leaves and sponged the edges with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

Here's the inside of the card using another Basic Grey Wisteria paper.

And a look at the back. I ordered the personalized stamp from Scrapmagasinet. The website is in Norwegian, but I was able to use Google translate to work my way through the ordering process. Their customer service was great! The kraft border was made with a MS punch.